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2 New Yorker Writers Quit Over Roseanne's Involvement

Roseanne, the queen of crass, a contributor to The New Yorker? It's no joke.

Two writers at the magazine quit in protest over the comedian's involvement in The New Yorker's new "Women's Issue," which Roseanne helped design.

A magazine spokeswoman was quick to stress that Editor Tina Brown called all the shots for the 200-page issue, which hit newsstands Monday.

Roseanne's contribution was to attend two days of West Coast meetings at which she urged Brown to include non-traditional women writers. The sitcom star also posed for Annie Leibovitz with her infant son, Buck Thomas.

The more radical female writers included in the issue are Mary Daly, whose autobiography attacks patriarchy, and playwright-actress Anna Deavere Smith, whose interviews with prison inmates for a stage show are reproduced in the magazine.

"No, Roseanne was not an editor in the textual sense," writes James Wolcott, the magazine's television writer. "But she has the eye of an editor in her ability to pluck one good idea out of a pile of so-so ones and connect it to larger shifts in society."

Wolcott dismisses critics who say that the "semicolons our forefathers had died for were being sacrificed in a bonfire of cheap celebrity."

"The resistance to Roseanne is often a sort of rhetorical class warfare carried on under the guise of Good Taste," Wolcott writes. "It's the last refuge of a snob."